Sites like LibraryThing, Junklog, and Bibliophil provide important examples of how comprehensive bibliographic records and library catalogues can be created to not only describe items in the library, but to also provide an important avenue for people to share their reading interests and to create interactive and dynamic communities of interest. [program description].
Despite the title of this session indicating it's relevance for public library catalogues, I found it was quite interesting in relation to any library catalogue.
While many of us are familiar with social networking sites, like Facebook and Flickr, we may be less familiar with social cataloguing sites. Many people like to organize their books and share their interests with others. These social cataloguing (at least 16 popular cataloguing website are currently available) sites can alert us to how people like to interact with books and other readers and may help us explore ways to enhance our library catalogues or discovery tools to make the library catalogue experience more meaningful for our users. In addition, we were reminded of the research which indicates that for most people, discovery is less important than delivery - where is it and how soon can I have it?
I myself have used Library Thing as a catalogue to provide lists of new books to faculty in my subject areas. After listing these books and returning to the site, you can see which books are added frequently to other's catalogues. Following the catalogues of others who added particular books can be a way to explore other books on a particular subject, rather than using subject headings/related terms. Also mentioned in the session was the use of a chat widget inside a library catalogue and how this is another way to enhance interaction with the catalogue - yea LiveHelp! Slides for both presentations (L. Spiteri and L. Tarulli) are available on the conference website.
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